Social Distancing Compliant Virtual Queuing System for Public Services

Many public services offered by the government require personal attendance, which involves gathering in a waiting area to be fairly served on a first-come, first-served basis, i.e., queueing, or pre-booked appointments. Over time, there have been improvements to the process by providing electronic systems that generate sequenced numbers to ensure fairness. Other advances have also led to enhancements of the waiting area environment to make it more relaxing and hospitable. Such efforts have been successful to some extent, but still, they rely on the customers' physical presence in a waiting area. The recent crisis due to the COVID19 pandemic and the necessity for everyone to observe social distancing posed a new challenge. The space provided by the waiting areas has become insufficient. On several occasions, it has been noticed that people had to break social distancing restrictions due to space limitations to complete a public service, causing health risks to themselves and others, including service staff. Such risks are propagated in healthcare facilities involving diseased, sick, and reduced immunity people. To address this new challenge and provide a more compliant environment for social distancing restrictions, a design-thinking approach is used to design a digital service to address social distancing while queuing/waiting in public healthcare centres in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The proposed solution enhances the queuing process and reduces the dependency on physical presence within the waiting area in exchange for a much dynamic digital application. The application enables customers to enter the queue remotely and synchronize their physical location and attendance with the service availability time and distance, allowing customers to utilize their time better and even being physically elsewhere. At the same time, they are still counted on the service queue. The system determines who should be available at the waiting area according to space and service availability, ensuring fairness. This solution is expected to reduce the number of people physically available at the service area; thus, social distancing can be better observed. At the same time, the solution provides customers with a waiting location of their choice and comfort; and is expected to increase customers' service satisfaction while maintaining their safety.